The Great Recession
14 Nov 2016 Leave a comment
in Euro crisis, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics
Jeffrey Lacker on the inherent instability of the financial system
03 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, global financial crisis (GFC)
Did @AnnPettifor correctly predict the global financial crisis in 2003?
21 Sep 2016 1 Comment
in economic history, global financial crisis (GFC), macroeconomics, monetary economics
You are not much of a leftover Marxist if you are not predicting a crisis in capitalism is on the horizon.
https://twitter.com/PolicyObsAUT/status/778456702655995904
Capitalism is supposed to collapse under its own inner contradictions.
Professional stock market tipsters are notorious from specialising in predicting doom as well and they still get listened too despite terrible forecasting records.
Plenty of people warned of dark days ahead in the lead up to the global financial crisis. An essay anyone can read with profit is Ross Levine’s An Autopsy of the U.S. Financial System: Accident, Suicide, or Negligent Homicide? His abstract says
The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products (“suicide”).
Rather, the evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. Moreover, although the major regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies, they chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system’s collapse.
The New York Times warned in 1999 that Fannie Mae was taking on so much risk that an economic downturn could trigger a “rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s,” and emphasised this point again in 2003. Greenspan testified before a Senate committee in 2004 that the increasingly large and risky Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac portfolios could have enormously adverse ramifications.
You predict a financial crisis by pointing to adjustments in your share portfolio to take advantage of shorting the market and then showing how big a profit you made afterwards.
The movie The Big Short highlights that its protagonists had skin in the game. They were investing in mortgages or shorting the same in the expectation of the crash they were predicting. Much of the drama in the film is about how long their foretelling of a crash took to come true.
There were no windbags and armchair critics in The Big Short talking gloom and doom on the horizon without investing their own money to profit from their forecasts.
Tom Sargent on Macroeconomic Theory and the Crisis
12 Jun 2016 Leave a comment
in business cycles, currency unions, economics, Euro crisis, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics, monetary economics Tags: Tom Sargent
General government net financial liabilities as % Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Irish GDPs
03 Jun 2016 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, Euro crisis, financial economics, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), macroeconomics Tags: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, public debt management, sovereign debt crises, sovereign defaults, Spain
I had borrowed a lot of money from scratch after 2007. Greece borrowed a lot of money of its own accord from 2010. Italy always owed a lot of money. Spanish do not know all that much money considering their dire financial circumstances.
Source: OECD Economic Outlook June 2016 Data extracted on 01 Jun 2016 12:57 UTC (GMT) from OECD.Stat
Equilibrium unemployment rate: USA, UK, France, Germany, Canada & Australia, 1985-2017
02 Jun 2016 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic growth, economic history, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, labour economics, labour supply, unemployment Tags: British economy, Canada, equilibrium unemployment rate, France, Germany, natural unemployment rate
I do admire the way in which the USA has been able to have a steadily falling equilibrium unemployment rate since 1984 through thick and thin. The Great Recession had no impact on the US equilibrium unemployment rate. Not only has the largest member been able to do this, the OECD host country (red squares) has had a pretty steady natural unemployment rate too all things considered.
Source: OECD Economic Outlook June 2016 Data extracted on 01 Jun 2016 12:40 UTC (GMT) from OECD.Stat
Interesting critique of the Big Short (moral hazard)
15 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, economics of media and culture, global financial crisis (GFC), law and economics, macroeconomics Tags: moral hazard, The Big Short
Deposit insurance
11 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, economic history, economics, economics of regulation, global financial crisis (GFC), macroeconomics, monetary economics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: bank runs, banking crises, banking panics, deposit insurance, Thomas Sargent
Many of the key issues about what modern macroeconomics has to say on global financial crises and deposit insurance are discussed in a 2010 interview with Thomas Sargent
Sargent said that two polar models of bank crises and what government lender-of-last-resort and deposit insurance do to arrest or promote them were used to understand the GFC. They are polar models because:
- in the Diamond-Dybvig and Bryant model of banking runs, deposit insurance and other bailouts are purely a good thing stopping panic-induced bank runs from ever starting; and
- in the Kareken and Wallace model, deposit insurance by governments and the lender-of-last-resort function of a central bank are purely a bad thing because moral hazard encourages risk taking unless there is regulation or there is proper surveillance and accurate risk-based pricing of the deposit insurance.
In the Diamond-Dybvig and Bryant model, if there is government-supplied deposit insurance, people do not initiate bank runs because they trust their deposits to be safe. There is no cost to the government for offering the deposit insurance because there are no bank runs! A major free lunch.
Tom Sargent considers that the Bryant-Diamond-Dybvig model has been very influential, in general, and among policy makers in 2008, in particular.
Governments saw Bryant-Diamond-Dybvig bank runs everywhere. The logic of this model persuaded many governments that if they could arrest the actual or potential runs by convincing creditors that their loans were insured, that could be done at little or no eventual cost to taxpayers.
In 2008, the Australian and New Zealand governments announced emergency bank deposit insurance guarantees. In Bryant-Diamond-Dybvig style bank panics, these guarantees ward off the bank run and thus should cost nothing fiscally because the deposit insurance is not called upon. These guarantees and lender of last resort function were seen as key stabilising measures. These guarantees were called upon in NZ to the tune of $2 billion.
- 1. The Diamond-Dybvig and Bryant model makes you sensitive to runs and optimistic about the ability of deposit insurance to cure them.
- The Kareken and Wallace model’s prediction is that if a government sets up deposit insurance and doesn’t regulate bank portfolios to prevent them from taking too much risk, the government is setting the stage for a financial crisis.
- The Kareken-Wallace model makes you very cautious about lender-of-last-resort facilities and very sensitive to the risk-taking activities of banks.
Kareken and Wallace called for much higher capital reserves for banks and more regulation to avoid future crises. This is not a new idea.
Sam Peltzman in the mid-1960s found that U.S. banks in the 1930s halved their capital ratios after the introduction of federal deposit insurance. FDR was initially opposed to deposit insurance because it would encourage greater risk taking by banks.
Late on Friday afternoon, Stuff posted an op-ed piece calling for the introduction of a (funded) deposit insurance scheme in New Zealand. It was written by Geof Mortlock, a former colleague of mine at the Reserve Bank, who has spent most of his career on banking risk issues, including having been heavily involved in the handling of the failure, and resulting statutory management, of DFC.
As the IMF recently reported, all European countries (advanced or emerging) and all advanced economies have deposit insurance, with the exception of San Marino, Israel and New Zealand. An increasing number of people have been calling for our politicians to rethink New Zealand’s stance in opposition to deposit insurance. I wrote about the issue myself just a couple of months ago, in response to some new material from the Reserve Bank which continues to oppose deposit insurance.
Different people emphasise different arguments in making the case for New Zealand to…
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Unemployment rates across the OECD in 2015
26 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic growth, Euro crisis, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, job search and matching, labour economics, macroeconomics, unemployment
Lunch and Conversation with Thomas J. Sargent
18 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in economic growth, economics, Euro crisis, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, job search and matching, macroeconomics, monetary economics, Public Choice Tags: Thomas Sargent
AEI reviews the Big Short
03 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in business cycles, Euro crisis, global financial crisis (GFC), macroeconomics
% industrialised countries at zero or near zero central bank interest rates
04 Feb 2016 Leave a comment
in business cycles, currency unions, Euro crisis, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, inflation targeting, macroeconomics, monetarism, monetary economics Tags: central banks, liquidity trap, monetary policy
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